Summary

Chapter 1 begins one month after Joe runs away to college to avoid arguing with his mother. Joe is filled with a sense of dread as he drives his twenty-year-old Honda Accord to Hillview Manor to find a stranger to interview for his biography class. At the nursing home, he explains his assignment to the receptionist, Janet, and Director Longren, lying that he has no family nearby. Since few of their residents retain their memories, Janet suggests that he should interview Carl Iverson. Iverson was convicted of raping and murdering a fourteen-year-old girl thirty years earlier. He was recently relocated from prison to Hillview Manor because he is dying of cancer. Joe's pleas to talk to Carl are interrupted by a phone call from his mother who is being arrested for a DUI. As Joe leaves to tend to his eighteen-year-old autistic brother, Mrs...